Old Oak Common Station, located in West London, is set to become the UK’s best-connected interchange station and will have an estimated 250,000 passengers passing through each day when it opens as part of the new London to Birmingham HS2 high-speed rail route.

Expedition’s reputation for creative engineering design led to a partnership with WSP’s engineering team for the project. We brought a holistic approach to the multidisciplinary team, composed of structural and civil engineers, architects and services engineers, as well as experts in sustainability. We worked closely with the whole team to achieve clear sustainability goals to save materials, reduce the embodied carbon and to make cost savings.

Expedition made significant design contributions across the almost 1km long station structure: saving material in the roof structure, developing a natural ventilation and a novel drainage scheme to reduce operational energy, reducing the foundation cost and material volumes, and improving the buildability of the ground floor slab.

The savings associated with these activities were:

Material savings of 1000 tonnes of steel for the roof structure, 450 tonnes of steel in the basement steel plunge columns and 4% of the steel reinforcement.

Current forecasts indicate a 43% reduction in whole-life carbon for the project, compared to the Stage 2 design (which was inherited from a different design team).

Cost savings are estimated to be around £8 million directly linked to materials savings and £50million due to the rethinking of the design methods and construction of the basement box (foundations and ground slab).

Matthew Botelle, Hs2 Programme director, said: ‘This work is a great example of how the latest design thinking and techniques are being used on the HS2 programme to provide best value to the UK taxpayer.’